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Chores and allowance for keeping the house clean AND building character

One of the questions I hear most often from other families—blog readers and friends alike—is how we handle chores and allowance as a family. There are so many different approaches out there…

unpaid chores as a contributing member of the family

a regular allowance tied to age rather than chores

paid daily chores

paid optional jobs

As a family, we do a combination of all of these.

For us, chores and allowance offer more than just a way to keep the house clean; they’re also an opportunity to teach so many different values and skills for life—hard work and diligence, team work and entrepreneurship, money management and more.

At a high level that means that our approach looks like this:

1. Everyone pitches in with daily chores because we’re all members of the same family and we work together to keep the house clean and everybody fed.

2. Everyone has the opportunity to pick up regular paid chores that they do on a daily basis as well. My rule is that you get a say in whether you take the regular job, but once you commit it’s yours for a time. And if you complain, it becomes an unpaid chore.

3. We offer lots of job opportunities so that our girls can earn additional money based on their willingness to work.

4. For now, we don’t offer a regular allowance outside of those tied to their chores. In the future, I can see giving them a monthly allowance that they’ll need to budget for clothes, going out with friends, and other various odds and ends to help them practice money management, but for now we pay for those things just because they’re part of the family.

5. We require them to tithe and save out of the money they earn.

On a day-to-day basis, that approach looks like this:

1. Daily chores that we all share and rotate include straightening the house, loading the dishwasher, wiping the kitchen table, taking care of the animals, putting away groceries, straightening the front closet, helping with the babies, etc.

2. Paid jobs include laundry, wiping the kitchen cabinets (how do they get so dirty?), cleaning the bathrooms, vacuuming, etc.

3. Additional job opportunities include things like babysitting for a set period of time, helping me with computer projects, pulling weeds, washing pots and pans after we let it get out of control (which really only takes a day of cooking in this house!).

4. We have a weekly budget for groceries, eating out and other extras that include ice cream and movie dates, supplies for projects they want to work on, etc., so the spending portion of their earnings is almost exclusively for fun stuff they want to spend it on.

5. We talk about “living on 50% of their income” and setting aside the other half for tithes (10%) and savings (40%). I have a Capital One 360 savings account for each of them, and I’ll write them a check for their savings and let them help me deposit it via the mobile app so they can see the balance growing each time.

A couple of years ago I created this printable time card for them to use to track their earnings, and it’s one we still use. However, we’ve had issues with it getting lost or taken off the bulletin board, so we now keep it on a clipboard in the kitchen. If you lose it, you don’t get paid, so I highly recommend that they leave it attached to the clipboard at all times. (It’s also their responsibility to write down their jobs if they want to get paid.)

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Although our chores and allowance routines have been in place for a couple years now, our top focus over the past year has been making sure that our girls are really helping with the chores it takes to keep our house clean because the workload is just too much for Sean and I without their help. While I have been very happy with the changes we’ve made so far, there are a couple areas where we’ve still been struggling:

getting the bathrooms really clean

knowing which jobs to assign when to keep the house decently clean on a regular basis

As I was selecting products for this year’s Ultimate Homemaking Bundle, I was selfishly looking at them through this lens. I wanted to find ebooks, ecourse and printables that would help reduce the stress of running my home, with the assumption that these things would help you as well.

Because I had early access to the bundle, I’ve been using several of the products for the past month or so to do just that, and I really love the difference these are actually making in our home:

Teaching Your Kids to Clean by Dana White ($5)

This whole ebook is wonderful, but tucked in the middle is the real gem—a photograph of a toilet with arrows and numbers to show kids exactly how to clean the toilet, making sure they clean the least germy areas first, prompting them to use new rags or wipes after especially germy areas, and reminding them to clean the oft-forgotten areas. Dana from A Slob Comes Clean included this for nonreaders, but I’ve printed it out specifically for my big girls because I was so tired of having to go behind them each time they cleaned the bathroom!

The Motivated Moms Chore Planner (May 2016-June 2017) ($8)

The Motivated Moms system takes all the tasks needed to run your home and divides them into daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly tasks, which are scheduled right on the planner for you. I’ve never used a chore planner like this before, but I love that I can just assign those tasks to our girls (adding them to their daily checklist) and feel confident that we’re keeping our home clean overall.

Cleaning Around the Seasons by Becky Rapinchuk ($10)

Becky, aka Clean Mama, truly is the queen of clean, and she wrote this ebook to help readers spring clean no matter how much time they had to devote to it—a day, a week, or a whole month. Although we haven’t had a chance to dive into it yet, it includes printable checklists and more to take the stress out of spring cleaning, and that will make it easy to divide these tasks among our family as well!

The Nester’s Cozy Minimalist Mom eCourse ($29)

Myquillyn Smith, aka The Nester, has been encouraging women for years that “it doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful,” and in this course she’s partnered with a friend to help moms address the clutter that comes with children and family to create cozy, beautiful homes around the Legos and Barbies and craft supplies. I am very much looking forward to this course to see if we can finally get on top of the persistent clutter that seems to take over the house every day despite our best efforts!

Grove Collaborative’s Special Bonus Offer

In addition to the products in the bundle itself, there are several amazing bonus offers, including a wonderful collection of products from Grove Collaborative! New customers will get a FREE Cleaning Kit, including Mrs. Meyer’s Soap Dish, Mrs. Meyer’s Multi-Surface, Grove Collaborative Glass Spray Bottle, Grove Collaborative Walnut Scrubber Sponges, plus a FREE VIP trial.

The minimum checkout for their cart is $20, but with the special discounts they’re offering, you’ll walk away with more than $75 worth of products for less than $30, including one of these handy cleaning caddies. We’ve purchased a few of these and love that they make it easy to keep cleaning supplies together and to carry them from room to room.

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The resources I listed are just a few of the “Organization and Routines” section of The 2016 Ultimate Homemaking Bundle, which is just one category out of eleven to help you take the stress out of homemaking.

Although the bundle contains more than $1,000 worth of resources, it’s on sale this week only for just $29.97—and that makes it a sweet deal even if you only ever use a couple of 93 eBooks, eCourses and printables!

You’ll find resources that have been handpicked (by me!) on the things that truly matter to you:

organization, routines & creating a cozy home

recipes, grocery shopping and meal planning

budgeting and saving money

motherhood (no matter what age your kids are)

cultivating a strong marriage

faith (for you & your kids)

and even self-care (like exercise, weight loss, life planning and coloring books!)

and much more…

Click here to see everything that’s included. Don’t wait too long to get yours because once the sale ends on May 2nd, it’s gone for good. And with a 30-day money back guarantee, what do you have to lose?

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This Post Has One Comment

Kelly Cook

1 May 2016

Thanks for sharing how you handle this potentially complicated and hot button topic! I see merits on both sides, and as our kids are just 8, 9, & 10 now, they’re at a point of needing to learn the value of a job well done. I’ve been contemplating recently what jobs I’d put on a “for money” list and how to handle it. What I’ve come up with, but haven’t put into practice yet, is there will be a list of paid jobs to choose from, but they can’t choose any until their daily chores are done. I think I’ll write the job and how much it pays on an index card and when a child completes it and I’ve inspected (or Dad), we’ll initial and date it, and it goes into and envelope to be paid out at the end of the week. Most of this became clear after reading your article, so thanks for the help!

While I appreciate how you’ve interwoven your posts with promotion of the bundle sale, I made a commitment to myself that I wasn’t buying any bundles this year because I haven’t fully utilized past purchases. I do like knowing what’s in the bundle and what others think and how they’re using it though, so do that again next year, please!